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How Scientific Is Scientific Essentialism? J Gen Philos Sci (2009) 40:85–101 DOI 10.1007/s10838-009-9074-4 ARTICLE How Scientific Is Scientific Essentialism? Muhammad Ali Khalidi Published online: 12 February 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract Scientific essentialism holds that: (1) each scientific kind is associated with the same set of properties in every possible world; and (2) every individual member of a scientific kind belongs to that kind in every possible world in which it exists. Recently, Ellis (Scientific essentialism, 2001; The philosophy of nature 2002) has provided the most sustained defense of scientific essentialism, though he does not clearly distinguish these two claims. In this paper, I argue that both claims face a number of formidable difficulties. The necessities of scientific essentialism are not adequately distinguished from semantic necessities, they have not been shown to be necessities in the strictest sense, they must be relativized to context, and they must either be confined to a subset of scientific properties without warrant or their connection to causal powers must be revoked. Moreover, upon closer examination (1) turns out to be a trivial thesis that can be satisfied by non-kinds, and (2) is inapplicable to some of the most fundamental kinds in the basic sciences. Keywords Essence Á Essentialism Á Science Á Natural kinds Á B. Ellis 1 Introduction Though it has not always been labeled as such, ‘‘scientific essentialism’’ has been a popular position among philosophers since the work of Kripke (1972/1980) and Putnam (1975). Both Kripke and Putnam used thought experiments involving possible worlds to suggest that some general terms, like individual proper names, are rigid designators. The thesis that a proper name is a rigid designator is fairly straightforward and amounts to the claim that it picks out the same entity in every possible world in which that entity exists. However, the extension of this notion to general terms is not so clear. It cannot be taken to mean that a rigid general term picks out the same set of entities in every possible world, since very few, if any, general terms would seem to satisfy this condition, and certainly not the ones commonly associated with essences (the term ‘tiger’ would surely pick out a different set M. A. Khalidi (&) Department of Philosophy, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 123 86 M. A. Khalidi of creatures in another possible world). Instead, there seem to be two proposals for how this notion can be extended to general terms, both of which involve an essentialist claim of some kind. The first is to say that a general term G is rigid just in case it picks out the same property or set of properties in every possible world. The second way to understand the notion of rigid designation as applied to general terms is to say that a general term G designates rigidly just in case for every individual i,ifG applies to i in the actual world then G applies to i in every possible world in which i exists. Corresponding to these two construals of rigid designation, are two essentialist theses, which are not always clearly distinguished by essentialists and their critics. They may be formulated as follows: Essentialism about kinds (EK): In every possible world, kind K is associated with the same set of properties {P1, …, Pn}. Essentialism about individual membership in kinds (EM): Every individual member i of kind K belongs to K in every possible world in which that individual exists. Although (EK) appears to be independent of (EM), a case can be made for the claim that (EM) presupposes (EK). It seems difficult to maintain essentialism about kind membership without being an essentialist about kinds themselves. Unless kind K has some essential properties, the claim that an individual is essentially a member of K would appear to be vacuous. Therefore, I take it that (EM) presupposes (EK), but the converse does not appear to be the case. Scientific essentialism holds that the above theses apply to scientific kinds, or at least some scientific kinds. The main argument or family of arguments in support of the first essentialist thesis is commonly thought to be based on the Twin Earth thought experiments developed by Putnam. Typically, we are asked to consider another possible world just like this one in every respect except that the substance that fills the oceans, quenches thirst, falls from the clouds, and so on, is not composed of H2O, as on earth, but has some other chemical composition, XYZ. Since, the argument goes, we are intuitively reluctant to consider that this substance is water, and since we would reserve the term ‘water’ exclusively for substances that are composed of H2O, in this world as in every possible world, this shows that water is necessarily composed of H2O, which seems to support EK. This argument and these intuitions have been the subject of a great deal of philosophical analysis, and I will not attempt to summarize the debate here. In this paper, I intend to bracket this argument for two reasons. First, while the intuitions that it elicits are widely shared, they are by no means universal and have been challenged on a number of counts. Second, whatever the status of the argument, it is geared mainly towards the use of natural kind terms in the vernacular, rather than the use of scientific terms. What we would or would not say when it comes to our ordinary word ‘water’ is not directly transferable to our use of general terms in scientific discourse. If scientific essentialism is to be justified as a philosophy of science, its metaphysical claims need to be squared with the aims and practices of science. Recently, scientific essentialism has received perhaps its most sustained defense in two works by Ellis (2001, 2002). Ellis claims that scientific essentialism is ultimately justified by according better with science in a general way and that it is the best ‘‘metaphysic’’ for science. However, I will argue that essentialism encounters some fundamental problems which constitute obstacles to integration with science and a naturalized account of sci- entific inquiry. In what follows, I will raise a number of foundational problems for the two essentialist theses identified above as applied to science, problems which I take to present serious obstacles to accepting essentialism about scientific kinds. Some of these problems will be relevant to EK, others to EM, and yet others to both. Throughout, I will be 123 How Scientific Is Scientific Essentialism? 87 concerned to show that essentialism does not provide an adequate metaphysical basis for science, either because some of its central claims are inadequately supported or because they are out of keeping with some aspects of science as we know it.1 2 Metaphysical and Semantic Necessity Advocates of scientific essentialism insist that theirs is a thesis of metaphysical rather than semantic necessity. They maintain that when it comes to EK, attributions of essences to scientific kinds do not (merely) concern the terms used to identify those kinds, but rather the kinds themselves.2 The essences they are concerned with are supposed to be explan- atory and discoverable a posteriori by science, rather than merely nominal or stipulative. For example, it is part of the essence of electrons to have a negative charge of 1.60 9 10-19 C, and that is a fact about electrons rather than one about how we choose to apply the term ‘electron’. Such claims have been contested by critics of essentialism, who have challenged essentialists to show that the claim that electrons necessarily possess certain properties is a claim about electrons themselves.3 Some of these critics charge that no amount of empirical investigation of electrons could possibly ground a claim of necessity, since all that such an inquiry could uncover would be facts about how electrons actually are, not how they are necessarily. But Ellis has an indirect way of arguing that the necessities that he is interested in are grounded in the natures of things rather than the way we use language. Ellis puts forward two arguments for the claim that his essentialist theses about electrons (among many other kinds) are a matter of metaphysical rather than semantic necessity. His first argument is that if someone does not know that all electrons are negatively charged that does not show that he does not know what electrons are (Ellis 2001, pp. 34–35). He contrasts this with a standard case of analyticity, such as the purported fact that all bachelors are unmarried men. In that case, someone who does not know that all bachelors are unmarried men does not know what a bachelor is. In other words, Ellis thinks that it is a mark of semantic necessity that not knowing the definiens is tantamount to not knowing what the definiendum is, whereas that is not the case for metaphysical necessity. But notice that in the bachelor case, Ellis ima- gines a case in which someone does not know the entire definition, while in the electron case, he merely imagines a case in which someone fails to know one of the tenets of the purported definition. Ellis does not think that having negative charge is the only essential property of electrons; he also claims that electrons necessarily have all their intrinsic properties: charge magnitude, mass, spin angular momentum, and so on. Therefore, to see whether this argument is sound, we need to expand the purported definition of ‘electron’ so that it includes not just the property of being negatively charged but other allegedly essential properties of electrons, namely: ‘‘An electron is 1 In addition to Ellis, other recent expressions of scientific essentialism can be found in Bealer (1987, 1994), and Bird (2001).
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